Books: The Editors Like

THE LITTLE MADELEINEby Mrs. Robert Henrey. (Dutton, $4.00.) Mrs. Henrey grew up in Montmartre in the early 1900s, in a world full of life and short of money. Her autobiography is enchanting, for she can convey places, people, and atmosphere equally well, and re-creates her Paris childhood without, nostalgia or sentimentality. This is a truly exceptional book.

HOLMES-LASKI LETTERSedited by Mark De Wolfe Howe. (Harvard University Press, 2 vols., $12-0.) The letters of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski run from 1916 to 1935 and are far ahead of the field in interest and distinction.

THE CHALLENGEby Phyllis Bottome. (Harcourt, Brace, $4.75.) The author describes her battle with tuberculosis, early romances, and the start of her literary career in the second volume of a likable, unpretentious biography.

PORTRAITS BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDSedited by Frederick W. Hilles. (McGraw-Hill, $4.00.) Reynolds dabbled with writing in addition to his painting, and his sketches of such contemporaries as Johnson, Goldsmith, and Garrick turned up in that formidable treasure-trove, the Boswell Papers. A lively historical curiosity.

THE HATE MERCHANTby Niven Busch. (Simon & Schuster, $3.95.) Gaspar D. Splane, phony clergyman and amateur Hitler, is the central figure in this absorbing study of the power of hate,

THE DISGUISES OF LOVEby Robie Macauley. (Random House, $3.00.) In this ingeniously constructed novel, three different narrators describe a love affair. Each one distorts the facts to suit, a private vision. Where that leaves Love is a question, but the book is lively and shrewd.

LANDFALLby Helen Hull. (Coward-McCann, $3.50.) Her husband’s illness leads a hot-shot female publisher to reassess her rather shaky marriage in the course of this intelligent, rather underplayed domestic novel.

THE NAKED ISLANDby Russell Braddon. (Donbleday, $3.50.) Mr. Braddon was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. His account of prison camp brutality and slave labor is enough to curdle a reader s blood. It also crackles with humor and humanity. It is, in fact, almost impossible to put down.

U-BOAT 977by Heinz Schaeffer. (Norton, $3.50.) The war in the Atlantic from the point of view of a German U-boat commander who eventually took his ship and crew to South America does nothing to raise one’s estimate of the Nazis, but it has a high quota of exciting episodes.

THE WHITE RABBITby Bruce Marshall. (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50.) This moving story of a British secret agent operating in occupied France is mostly a matter of courage, suffering, narrow escapes, and terrifying disasters, with a bit of wry comedy thrown in.